Megan McArdle is officially the Paganini of the world’s smallest violin playing just for the not-quite-rich-enough folks.

When middle-class people lose their jobs, they need to suck it up and admit that they’re too fucking soft and lazy to live in dormitories like REAL workers do in China. They need to accept cuts to their health care and retirement funds and if they complain about it, they need a lecture on morality from Daddy Bobo.

When people making 400K get bumped down to 300K, it’s a three-hanky tragedy.

Tell me again that Robespierre didn’t have a point.

Update. Megan front-pages some wise words from a commenter:

Another factor I’ve noticed with my bankruptcy clients is that a very rich person whose income takes a sudden precipitous drop to a still-pretty-good income can actually wind up in more financial trouble, faster, than a very poor person whose income drops to zero. If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year, unless you have substantial liquid savings or are able to sell your house and your car and your boat yank your kids out of private school REALLY fast, you’re going to wind up in bankruptcy in a fairly short space of time. A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt. Not that it’s not still ultimately much better to be the rich person, but the rich person does get hit with a more panic-inducing financial calamity in the short term.

Holy Marie Antoinette! The update from the tax guybwho explais that poor people can just get food stamps and move in with their parents–if they have any and the parents lease doesn’t forbid it, of course!–is just jaw dropping. Megan isn’t Sui generis but apparently surrounded by like minded Koch suckers.

Holy Marie Antoinette! The update from the tax guybwho explais that poor people can just get food stamps and move in with their parents–if they have any and the parents lease doesn’t forbid it, of course!–is just jaw dropping. Megan isn’t Sui generis but apparently surrounded by like minded Koch suckers.

At the next OWS gathering, we need to bring guillotines, mannequins, ropes, rusty can-openers, some kielbasa, wicker baskets, pikes, some gasoline, matches, and a sign.

Set up the guillotine.
Bring out the mannequin.
Tie rope to the mannequins limbs.
Tear off the limbs.
Take the rusty can-opener, and fake gutting the mannequin.
Pull out the kielbasa as if it was intestines.
Hack off the head with the guillotine.
Put the head on a pike.
Put the pike by the road.
Pour the gasoline on the mannequins body.
Take the matches and set the body on fire.

Unfurl the sign, which reads, “Are We Making The Message Any Clearer, ASSHOLES?”

” it’s actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else… I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.

Let’s not forget that these are kids we’re talking about ”

That is a good point. I can feel sorry for rich people’s children.

Actually, I CAN feel sorry about a rich person who falls down a notch. Just like I feel sorry for a rich person who scuffs their gazillion dollar shiny patent leather shoes if they stumble on a vulgar street curb.

On the other hand, all my parent friends seem to think that it’s actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else, particularly in the middle of a school year. I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.
Let’s not forget that these are kids we’re talking about–we shouldn’t take joy in uspetting them, even if their parents happen to make a lot more money than we do.

About time we got some fucking perspective in the Liberal Media.The kids who have to transfer mid-year from Snobswallet Academy in Manhattan to Howard Taft Middle School because their parents had to downgrade from the duplex with marble countertops on the UWS to the mock tudor with granite countertops in Leafygreenburb are just like the kids sleeping in a car and getting one meal a day from the food bank van because their parents lost their apartment when their mom lost the job with health coverage and they had to start paying bout of pocket for their dad’s insulin and their little sister’s asthma medication. Stop the H8, libs!

I made it about two or three paragraphs… basically, “WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE (RICH) CHILDREN? Having to be pulled out of their really nice private schools because mommy and daddy fucked over the economy didn’t get their six figure bonus”

Sucks for the kids, but you know what other kids it sucks for? The one’s whose parents were foreclosed on (and evicted) because they got sold a shitty mortgage by shady brokers and lenders. Not to mention the kids whose parents lost their job because the banks decided to stop making business loans.

Totally OT, but what did our resident Romneytroll have to say by the end of the night last night? When that insurmountable lead in absentees turned out to be a 4 point win?

The update from the tax guy who explais that poor people can just get food stamps and move in with their parents—if they have any and the parents lease doesn’t forbid it, of course!—is just jaw dropping.

Yeah. I like how he says they can “wait till a new job materializes.” Like if the only factory in your shitty little town closes and you’re an 80 mile commute from anything else.

It boggles my mind – so a poor family moving back into mom’s cramped little bungalow or trailer and getting food stamps – ho hum! But having to sell the boat and yank junior out of Andover! Such suffering!

here’s my open thread comment:
How can the GOP fight to say tobacco companies DO NOT have to “inform” customers of graphic images of the damage cigarettes cause, but women’s health clinics must perform medically unnecessary invasive procedures to provide graphical images of fetusi to women seeking abortion, which, if i remember med school correctly, completely violates the Hippocratic Oath?

Is the ‘service’ of an abortion not also a product they are hell bent on ‘regulating’ even though they are against any and all regulation of anything else that causes unhealthiness to humans and children? I can think of other things besides cigarettes that actually kill instead of just terminating a pack of cells that only >30% of us consider “killing” life(not even actual people yet). I would seriously like to see a front page post by you on these two of many contradictions.

—–

Also, kinda unrelated, I would also like to see a separate front page post on this:

Back in the day, lets say 30s thru late 90s, back in the “good old days” according to the GOP, this may surprise you, but, even in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, before the ‘hippie era,’ there were some people (given the time period, i’m talking about white people) who didn’t have medical insurance and also couldn’t afford the couple of chickens it cost to have a doctor come cure your flu. So, as a comforting excuse to maintain an appearance of ‘normalcy’ for their children, they would lie and simply tell their kids that their health was in God’s hands, and that that new fangled medical doctor stuff was not putting their faith in the Lord. These kids grew up to become boomers who became the crazy part of the GOP that somehow didn’t get the reveal that these were just like fairy tales, told to kids, to protect them from the fear, shame, and embarrassment of being poor. These are the folks that are today so incredibly misinformed, untrusting of doctors and government, the anti-vaccine folk, and every one else we grew up thinking were only amish traits. I don’t think it was ever a ‘real’ branch of thought in the church from historical views, but rather a misunderstanding of the innocent lies parents tell their kids to protect them from shame over something they should never have been shamed or embarrassed by to begin with.

Think of the literature and arts from the time. Death of a Salesman. Anything Goes. and any 20s, 30s, 40s era black and white ‘classic’ movie, etc. etc. – those white, lower middle class-newly poor, thanks to the depression, still tried everything they could to project an image of middleclassness to others that they constantly lied to even themselves about things.

The pain told in those stories was primarily from the struggle to maintain an image of being normal for the times that they ended up doing damage to the real meanings of life. Only, the moral from those tales has been completely forgotten, and the lies told to project the image of middle-class normalcy to the young children has sadly turned into the fact and lessons to them as adults from those times.

Its actually incredibly sad. I would like to see you expand this clearer in a front page post as well.

That update makes me want to goddamn break something. Bankruptcy is an epidemic of the lower class. Any small bump in the road fucks you over and ruins your life, and that was before our wise masters changed the rules and made it more punishing and harder to escape. One of the worst aspects of our health care system is that anyone without good insurance (crappy insurance often won’t cut it) lives one medical event away from bankruptcy and foreclosure. It is an awfully effective speedbump on the way to class mobility, and I don’t doubt that helps explain why Republicans throw their body on the tracks to prevent reforming it.

If bankruptcy becomes a tangible possibility for these masters of the universe, fucking fantastic. Maybe they will ask their servants in DC to strike some of the pointless cruelty back out of our bankruptcy laws.

So who wants to compare and contrast her sympathy for New Yorkers making 300K to her thoughts on the foreclosure crisis? I’m guessing she sides with banks when it’s faceless “irresponsible” poor people, but a terrible tragedy to lose your home when it’s somebody she might invite to a dinner party.

”it’s actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else… I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.”

So little Junior, Esquire, has to leave Andover and attend the public school in whatever rich suburb the family lives in. Yes, it is tough – he might even have to park an American car in a lot full of other kids’ BMWs.

It’s a heckuva lot harder when the reason you yank the kids out of school is because you’re homeless.

Hey, that rich guy pulling down 300k a year might have to take bankruptcy if their income falls to 125k a year, while the poor guy who was making 18k and loses his job can just crash on his mom’s couch until he finds another job, so it’s much more stressful for the rich man.

Notwithstanding that he still pulls down a great annual salary at 125k/year and can afford a fantastic middle class lifestyle virtually anywhere in America, has a support network of business contacts to help him transition to a new job or give him a leg up, and making that much money a year and being clear of debts after bankruptcy means he’ll have plenty of banks still willing to lend or give credit to him, albeit at a slightly higher interest rate for a couple of years, all in all leaving him in a fantastic state that most of us are still striving for. Pity the man, you serfs!

Alsotoo, banking should be a boring job with decent but not great pay. Any college graduate can write loans and keep track of deposits. Crazy salaries just represent a symptom of a larger problem: brilliant people creating fake value through hidden leverage, fudged reports, misdirection and jargony bullshit. Every time one of them sells his second home in the Berkshires and finds another line of work we ought to throw a party.

Wall Street headhunter Daniel Arbeeny said his “income has gone down tremendously.” On a recent Sunday, he drove to Fairway Market in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn to buy discounted salmon for $5.99 a pound.

@jl: Mmm, Brussel sprouts. Caramelize in skillet in renderings from some good slab bacon and a drizzle of olive oil with onion and garlic. Hit the pan with a splash of chicken broth or dry white wine to deglaze. Season with salt, pepper, and a dash or two of balsamic vinegar. Top with crumbled bacon.

As for McMegan, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear she was attempting satire. Alas, I know better.

I lurk on a family problems website where families routinely make around 18,000 a year–and that is sometimes with both parents working. When someone like that loses a job its not some twenty year old returning home to crash on mom’s couch its an entire family, with kids, with no where to go. As someone said upthread people who are poor or who lose their job go bankrupt too. And they then can’t access the credit or the other goodies that cushion lots of things. For example: no credit card no ability to pay your co-pay then no medicine even if you have some kind of health insurance. Or: bad credit and you can’t get your utilities turned back on. Or you can’t get first, last, and security deposit to move into an apartment.

And all of this happens to the children of poor people. Not just imaginary singletons in MEgan’s mind.

It just boggles my mind that she can be so sociopathic, emotionally and intellectually. IT goes against everything I believe about sentience and humanity. Its obvious that she has a rudimentary theory of mind because she grasps that her readers might feel sympathy for people if she alludes to the suffering of children. But its only rudimentary because she can’t manage to extend her argument or her field of vision to include the children of the not-rich in her discussion.

Meanwhile, the Texas doctor recently indicted for bilking Medicare of $350 million in what is now the largest healthcare fraud in US history was a major Tea Party Express donor … nobody could have anticipated that!

Meanwhile, the Texas doctor recently indicted for bilking Medicare of $350 million in what is now the largest healthcare fraud in US history was a major Tea Party Express donor … nobody could have anticipated that!

I’m sitting here, trying to find nearly $1500 for security deposit and first months rent by April; I would really, really love to discuss the tragedies of Megan McArdle’s poverty strucken rich person, who has been downgraded to $300k. As a person who has not seen $20k in income since 2000, I can only hope they survive. And my their precious children get the therapy they need for their trauma at leaving Prestigious Douche Academy for Modestly Prestigious Douche Charter. …Doug, are you trying to cause rampant incivility on the internets? Because I am dangerously close to suggesting uncivil things.

when middle class people take out a mortgage that’s perfectly affordable on the income they’ve been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don’t feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them

Obviously you aren’t familiar with the Tea Party, Ms. McArdle. If the joy isn’t apparent, the absolute unwillingness to support even the most modest safety net so those people DON’T HAVE to lose that house due to a temporary setback is not only apparent, but a defining feature of the TeaOP.

He won’t move out of Cobble Hill or wherever to the burbs. That’s the problem. He believes he’s entitled to live in Manhatten, in a brownstone, all to himself and his family.

Years ago I read a very powerful and absurdly sad photo-journalistic essay about the end of the wasp hegemony. People who were the secondary and tertiary heirs to Wasp Money, who had been divorced out of it or otherwise fallen to the edges of privilige, were interviewed. They were really stuck. They didn’t know how “other people” lived without their Arrow Shirts and their summer cottages. But they couldn’t afford those things. One guy explained that he could affort to remain on the fringes of the only society that mattered to him by not ever marrying. That way hostesses could continue to invite him as a “spare man” and he could continue to live life as a houseguest. If he were married (out and down) he’d never get invited anywhere.

That’s the feeling you get reading these pathetic tales of “but I thought I’d be a billionaire for sure by now.”

sooo, rich people who over-extended themselves and now may have to downsize to a $500,000 home(!!) deserve sympathy but the middle and working class who got kicked out of their homes do not and should actually be blamed for the mortgage crisis.

If you were making $300k a year and spending $200k of it on fixed expenses, and your household income drops to $125k a year, unless you have substantial liquid savings or are able to sell your house and your car and your boat yank your kids out of private school REALLY fast, you’re going to wind up in bankruptcy in a fairly short space of time. A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt.

This is just amazing…

If a person making 300k a year decides to live paycheck to paycheck (since their expenses are so damn high) they can only blame THEMSELVES if their income goes down and they aren’t prepared for it.

Why in the world should I feel sorry at all for someone like that who refuses to take personal responsibility for his own financial situation. Especially someone who made 300k per year!

Ms. McCardle, I don’t have anything against the rich per se, I’d just like to hang on to what little I’ve got and have a decent roof over my head with basic comforts, food, and adequate medical care and certain very wealthy, very powerful people want to take that away from me and everybody like me.

I would like to stop that from happening. WHY IS THAT SO INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT FOR YOU AND YOUR ILK TO UNDERSTAND?

I know, the audacity of that argument is breathtaking. When a poor person or a person of more modest income faces further hardship, it’s “well, you shouldn’t have been buying X, Y, or Z.” When a more affluent person faces the same situation, it’s “hard because they have to sell their boat.” Astounding.

Yeah, it was the front-paged comment that got me, too. Because only single guys with parents who are still alive, AND live nearby, AND have extra space – only THOSE guys get laid off while making 18K a year.

The family of four, with parents in assisted living? Those people NEVER get laid off.

On the other hand, all my parent friends seem to think that it’s actually really hard on kids to yank them out of school and move them somewhere else, particularly in the middle of a school year. I doubt that it gets any easier because your parents used to be able to afford stratospheric tuition.

Sounds like a Reality TV show in the making. The Formerly Rich Housewives of Beverly Hills Try a Middle Class Lifestyle.

O/T but can someone point me to a good rundown of why voting for a Democrat is not actually the same as voting for a Republican no matter how much a Ron Paul supporter says it. Thanks in advance!

How many Democrats are in favor of state sponsored rape of women? For that matter, how can a Ron Paul supporter, presumably libertarian, be in favor of taking away a woman’s liberty interest in her own body?

The reaction to these heartbreaking stories is typical, as the Peasant is simply unable to wrap its tiny, autonomic brain stem around the depths of the suffering of Makers all over this great country. Whether it’s a slightly higher top marginal tax rate, a reduction in expected bonus monies given to Makers by über-Makers for a job done, the hurtful disapproval of their lifestyle choices by the envious Peasant, or the pain of having to watch the sick Peasant obtain proper health coverage despite the fact that it obviously does not deserve such considerations, the USASR under the iron reign of Marxist Kenya Witch Doctor Man is no place for the beautiful souls of the Creators.

Trying to reason with a Ron Paul supporter is a fool’s errand my friend. Just slowly nod your head and walk away.

And back on topic, I have seen and read you guys talk about Megan McArdle and usually just don’t pay it much attention but I must admit sympathy for the rich is one of the god damndest things I have ever read.

I read the comment by the alleged bankruptcy guy and thought, “Spoken like someone who’s never suddenly faced zero income with no place to go, and moving back in with their parents as an adult.”

Let’s just say I’ve done that, and, having actually done it, I’ll take what’s behind door # $125 000 instead. Even without kids, it was a miserable experience, and my folks were, shall we say, not exactly eager to have me at home.

Also, I love (for values of “love” roughly synonymous with “despise”) the idea that jobs just materialize. Wingnuts love this trope, that unless it’s directly to their benefit (or to the detriment of people they don’t like), there are never any agents or actors doing anything anywhere. Nobody does anything in the Wingnutverse; things just happen.

It dovetails nicely with their inability to predict the blindingly obvious consequenses of their and others’ actions, for which there’s always the standby whine, “Nobody could have forseen…” and the convenient shutting-up of anybody who did have the foresight to realise the consequenses. (Which is damn pathetic for people who are always bleating on about “responsibility” and “consequenses.”)

Jobs don’t just materialize, you pathetic freak, not only do you have to put yourself in the running for them, but someone else who isn’t under your control gets to decide whether you get that job or not. That’s how it works outside the nepotism factory known as wingnut welfare, anyway.

His family rents the lower duplex of a brownstone in Cobble Hill, where his two children share a room. His 10-year- old daughter is a student at $32,000-a-year Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. His son, 7, will apply in a few years.

$32,000 a year to send your munchkin to fifth grade? Fuck these fucking people.

Not that it’s not still ultimately much better to be the rich person, but the rich person does get hit with a more panic-inducing financial calamity in the short term.

That’s only because they’re an idiot. The whole fucking point of increasing income should be to eliminate all of those fixed expenses before ramping up consumption. Once your can afford to pay off your house, fucking pay off the house, don’t use it as an excuse to buy a bigger or 2nd house. Once everything is paid off and you’ve banked a decade of fixed expenses, then you can start to add to your empire.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to increase my net worth in spite of my pretty meager income, but it all goes into future security. Until that net worth is enough to cover college for the kids, retirement, paying off the house, and to replace my income until my retirement kicks in should I lose my job tomorrow, then it doesn’t go to remodels or cars or any other luxury. That’s precisely what Republicans think every middle income person should be doing in lieu of a government safety net, yet NONE of them would agree that the so-called job creators should do the same thing.

A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt.

That’s a thing of beauty there. “Only a couple thousand dollars in debt” when your income is zero and your prospects are on the 20 grand level is fucking brutal.

Also, too, “move in with mom” is the new “get free medical care at the ER.” One thing the rich understand well is the accounting power of externalizing costs.

Our Cobble Hill friends are still smarting over that first year of the Great Recession in which their bonuses were cut by a bit…and they had to get used ski equipment for their kids when they went to Aspen. They had to cut back the nanny’s hours a bit, too. It was terrible.

Fortunately they’ve rebounded and are even contemplating taking the kids out of the $40K/year Manhattan school and sending them to a “public” boarding school in England, which is quite a bit more expensive.

Ya know, I’ve been that person who lost their job (granted, I was making big bucks at $23.5k, not a measly 18k) and was fortunate enough to be able to move back in with my parents once my lease expired. I was also down to the last $1.64 in my fucking pockets before my unemployment finally got processed (3 months into the saga). Both McAddled and her fucking bankruptcy lawyer commenter can go climb an impaling stake and end themselves, preferably on pay-per-fucking-view! Enduring a life disruption like that is hardly trivial, regardless of your starting financial situation.

@Interrobang: Also, Jobs don’t just materialize, you pathetic freak, not only do you have to put yourself in the running for them, but someone else who isn’t under your control gets to decide whether you get that job or not.

Though, as Newt tells us, the way you get off food stamps is to demand jobs. See, the reason you didn’t get hired is you weren’t demanding enough!

She doesn’t write articles about the tragic losses of people like these in SF. No, only the ones who are ‘victims’ of the ruthless capitalism they tell us is good for the country and all us lazy peons. Rich people should have guaranteed incomes but poor people can sleep on mom’s couch: That’s the wonderful invisible hand taking care of us all.

I’d just like to apologize to good writers like TNC for not reading his stuff (I know it’s not like I actually drive traffic) because I simply refuse to give page clicks to the virtual fishwrap that is his employer. I will not reward the employers of the likes of McMegan in any way.

@Frank: No, no, NO! The point is that rich people are BETTER than normal people. How do we know this? Because they are rich. So when they lose half their income and they haven’t saved, we should feel sorry for them and help them out because they DESERVE better from society *BECAUSE* THEY ARE RICH.

When some middle-class schlub whose made his living off of doing professional work off a college degree loses income, it’s his own damn fault for not investing with the right company, not starting his own recession-proof business, and not putting more money into his health savings account.

You might think it’s a double standard, Frank, but to my eyes it’s just acknowledging the value of the job creators. Nobody is going to be willing to make $2 million dollars a year unless we, as a society, engage them in a social contract to protect them from the horror of moving from Manhattan to Stamford. Seriously. Offer anyone the opportunity to make that kind of money with the risk of losing it, and I doubt you’ll find takers. Sociologist and psychologists have proven that losing something is actually worse than never having had it all. So, you know, science.

“Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”

Yes I can imagine it. How do you do that? You put them in fucking public school you fucking fuckwad.

Now, Megan’s right, we don’t have to feel glee about this and we can sympathize with the disruption this represents in the kids’ life. Changing schools isn’t easy. But they’re not being sent to the workhouse or sold for medical experiments. It’s public school. Maybe now you rich assholes will be willing to put a little effort into improving the commons.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you make $300k, tying up 2/3 of that in fixed expenses is fucking dumb financial mismanagement of the highest order.

Not to even mention if you make $18k, “only a couple of thousand dollars of debt” is the equivalent of $33,333 worth of debt for the person above, except it’s NOT because you could pay off that $33k in the first three months of the year with a $300k salary if you had any goddamn sense.

A person who was making $18k a year and suddenly finds themselves making nothing, as a practical matter, can often break their lease and move in with mom and get on food stamps until a new job materializes and wind up with only a couple thousand dollars in debt.

So in other words, the rich are to be sympathized with because they don’t know how to be poor but the poor deserve no sympathy because they already know how to be?

These kids should never have been in private school to start with. Hell, if all it takes is a job loss or a pay cut to not be able to afford the private school, then they as parents were incredibly irresponsible to have put them in private school to start with.

Same here. I admit to reading the occasional Fallows column when I see it referenced elsewhere and it interests me but other than that I’ve completely written off the Atlantic as a source for making me think critically. TNC should definitely take his show elsewhere.

@Interrobang: In their world, jobs do just materialize. A guy talks to a friend, “My son graduates from Harvard this year. Hasn’t an idea about how to get a job.” The friend responds, “Here’s my business card; tell him to call my assistant. Surely we can find him something.” It’s not what you know, it’s who your parents know.

@aimai: “It just boggles my mind that she can be so sociopathic, emotionally and intellectually. IT goes against everything I believe about sentience and humanity. Its obvious that she has a rudimentary theory of mind because she grasps that her readers might feel sympathy for people if she alludes to the suffering of children. But its only rudimentary because she can’t manage to extend her argument or her field of vision to include the children of the not-rich in her discussion.”

She’s evil. She’s not perfectly evil; IIRC I’ve seen one flash of sympathy for others from her.

But for all practical purposes she’s evil, and her job is advocating for evil.

@Frank: Hell, if all it takes is a job loss or a pay cut to not be able to afford the private school, then they as parents were incredibly irresponsible to have put them in private school to start with.

I don’t agree with that. If private school’s a priority, you pay for it. You even might go into debt for it, figuring your kids are only going to be school age for a few years. What you don’t do is act like there are no other options if your ability to pay for it does dry up.

I think we agree with each other. My point was if they are so close to not be able to afford it, and there are no other options (like a loan/line of credit or whatever) then it would very irresponsible as a parent to put them in a private school to start with only to have to yank them out shortly thereafter.

In other news, Louis XVI and Megan McArdle were seized in Varennes while apparently fleeing from Paris. Minimum wage earners and and unemployment claimants reportedly refused to remove their hats as the royal carriage was lead back to the Tuileries Palace in ignominy. They were followed by a drum circle from Occupy. McArdle reportedly claimed they were “going to talk to an Austrian economist” and that they were not actually fleeing the country.

The people interviewed in this article have no idea what it’s like to worry about keeping the lights on and your family fed. Okay, fair enough – people who don’t make that amount of money have no idea of the sense of entitlement the interviewees have, nor any idea of what it’s like to keep up with others in their social/financial circle. Andrew Schiff is having to cut back from four months at the shore to one month? Worried about how to keep up on the $32 fucking K for little Heather’s day school? That is just as traumatic, if not more so, than somebody’s spouse having to cut back on his or her heart medications because the spouse lost a job and the couple no longer has health insurance.

To paraphrase, these people can’t imagine a world in which they are no longer at the top of the socioeconomic heap as they perceive it. They’ve been saying for years that they deserve every penny they get paid because the market determines what they get paid, right? Guess what, assholes – the market has determined that you’re not worth what you used to be worth. Welcome to the same world that the rest of your fellow citizens live in. Look at it as a learning opportunity.

He knew what he was doing, even though he is a lot dumber than his father (who was also a jerk).

I’m so glad you mentioned what a jerk Billy Graham is, since there are few in this country who do so. My big beef with BG is that, after MLK died, BG talked about the “pact” they had, where MLK would go do the civil rights thing and BG would do the converting thing. Talk about false witness . . . doesn’t stop even when they’re dead.

It’s my observation that folks whose incomes rocket to unexpected heighte throw a ruler down on graph paper and draw the upward sloping line out into the future. Using this $500k example, they’ll quickly adapt a $600k lifestyle and expect everything to fall into place.

It’s why we have thousands of unoccupied suburbab mcmansions within fifty miles of here.

Fortunately they’ve rebounded and are even contemplating taking the kids out of the $40K/year Manhattan school and sending them to a “public” boarding school in England, which is quite a bit more expensive.

You should call child services on them. Any parent that sends their US based kids to a british public school is a criminal. The only upside is maybe their children are smart enough to want to run away from home and figure a US boarding school isn’t far enough.

@flukebucket: “And back on topic, I have seen and read you guys talk about Megan McArdle and usually just don’t pay it much attention but I must admit sympathy for the rich is one of the god damndest things I have ever read.”

It’s not just that; browser her back columns, and see what her sympathy for actual middle and working class people is.

If my family members spent the kind of money that all these stories claim goes along with their respective incomes then they would all be fucked financially and I would have grown up a fucking asshole like Megan McArdle

Thankfully, my family are Christians and not fake-ass Prosperity Gospel heretics

Remember that Congressman who explained that his seven-figure income wasn’t really that much once you started factoring in how he had to buy stuff with the money, which really cut into how much he got to keep? This is really how these people think. They’re monsters.

@PurpleGirl: “@Interrobang: In their world, jobs do just materialize. A guy talks to a friend, “My son graduates from Harvard this year. Hasn’t an idea about how to get a job.” The friend responds, “Here’s my business card; tell him to call my assistant. Surely we can find him something.” It’s not what you know, it’s who your parents know:”

@Svensker: My only experience with English boarding schools is from soap operas. Kids get sent there when they are no longer cute and three months later come back to take on the late teenager roles. Must be hellish places. They age kids 7-8 years in just a matter of months.

@asiangrrlMN: “Seriously, though. What does this woman have to do to get fired?”

Go leftist, although being a liberal would proabably be enough. Start publishing scathing columns about the financial crimes of our elites, and watch how fast the brass decide that she’s no long fit to be a business and economics editor.

I’m not good at summarizing complicated things, but it seems the gulf between Ron Paul’s philosophy and that of the Democratic Party is essentially bottomless. A Venn diagram would have the Dem’s circle in the middle left-hand of the page and Ron Paul’s circle in Texas.

Democrats want a government attuned to the peoples’ needs and that responds to them speedily and effectively.

Ron Paul wants little or no government of any kind and believes hard work fixes everything for everybody. We’re still trying to figure out how his son fits in.

I tried to read the article, and then I got to this statement from McCardle,

“One of the guys in the article makes $350,000 and lives in 1200 square feet with three kids. This is the way the lower rungs of the lower middle class lives in the rest of the country.”

And I had to light myself on fire. Is there some desire in her to continually pimp the notion that a $300k salary in NYC is the same as someone making $20k in Alabama? She routinely publishes the most moronically mendacious crap I have ever read.

Karen @111: yes, and the rest of the implication is that since poor people already know how to be poor, being out of work and out of a home and with no job prospects doesn’t keep them up at night like it does good upper middle class folks.

I’d like to get my hands on a couple of these people…and take them to meet a few people (after I tell them my own story, of course).

@Surly Duff: To give her IMMENSE benefit of the doubt, she probably means that the square footage and close quarters would be similar, not the money. But she didn’t write it very clearly. You might start to get the idea that she’s a lousy writer _and_ a terrible business and economics analyst!

Money Changes Everything
She said I’m sorry baby I’m leaving you tonight
I found someone new he’s waitin’ in the car outside
Ah honey how could you do it
We swore each other everlasting love
She said well yeah I know but when
We did–there was one thing we weren’t
Really thinking of and that’s money–

Patsy Cline, A Poor Man’s Roses (Or a Rich Man’s Money)
I must make up my mind today
What to have, what to hold
A poor man’s roses
Or a rich man’s gold

having been pulled out of a private school because the parent that could pay; post-divorce, simply didn’t think, i, personally, was worth it.it makes the parents having to suck it up and tell the kids they are broke, and the kids having to accept that shit happens seem quaint.

fuck that would have made me a lot happier, were it true. its easy to blame shit you have no control over, kids do it all the time. they adapt.

sorry not buying the kids part either. the kids would just find poorer kids to feel superior to, if that is their need.

it really is just about believing that your entire value is in the numbers on paper, and the status it permits you to demonstrate.

if you look at someone making 25k per year as the same thing as someone who is living on someone’s couch, then you see no status change, therefore no pain.

so much for respecting pride and work-ethic and all that shit. take this one out when megan starts talking all about the wonders of conservative base populism in a few months.

I guess you can start with Romney actually being one (corporate overlord) in real life and who remains one, through and through, with his $30M/yr income that requires no actual work on his part, amen. While Obama has never been one (the hated community organizer and career politician) but that doesn’t counter “But they both govern the same!”

To that last, all I can say is “Let’s not ever find out if Mittens would actually be the same, m’kay?”

It’s not that the $250K family is totally undeserving of sympathy, it’s that they’re way the fuck down the sympathy list. Somewhere after those in the middle class who are struggling, the working poor, the non-working poor, Afghani civilians, and so on. I promise to pray for the $250K family just as soon as I start believing in prayer and work my way down that far on the prayer list.

I know that I’m probably going to get blasted around here for saying this but I can see McArdle’s point, that a drastic reduction in income, whether you’re poor or moderately wealthy can cause pain in the family.

But McArdle seems to not understand is that the worker making $20,000 a year kind of has an excuse for living at the edge of his or her means, the person making $400,000 doesn’t have anyone to blame but themselves.

She wants to say that people who get in financial trouble don’t do so because of luxuries, but because of overspending on the basics. However, when you are overspending on the basics you’re really spending on unneeded luxuries, you’re just disguising them and rationalizing them as basics. To some degree you’re still just showing off by needing that Mercedes which is oh so much more safe than the Jeep (and stylish too) or that private school which is so much better than the local public school (and so prestigious!).

Note that she quotes M. Todd Henderson in the article about trivial losses being deserving of as much pity as major losses.

That would be the M. Todd Henderson who was world famous as a really really bad money manager and an amazingly stupid whiner. This M. Todd Henderson. He did not learn then that saying extremely stupid things in public is not a good idea, so he’s still at it. An McM is quoting the idiot approvingly.

@aimai: The problem with McMegan is sort of the same as the one I had, in that my life experience was very lucky until one day it was less so, but even then I was still very lucky.
The thing is that even though we were still ok, I suddenly understood what it was like for those other people who weren’t so lucky, hadn’t started out so lucky and who had ended up living in their cars or worse. I understood that it wasn’t because they were less virtuous, just less lucky.

I had no perspective, and I needed that minor blow* in order to become empathetic, in order to lose that sense of entitlement that comes with complacency.
Some people just need to be kicked down a notch or two themselves in order to see the people who really do not have it anywhere near as good.

Oh, and what you tell the kids when you have to move them to a new school mid-year or even late in the semester like we did, is that we are all going to have an adventure, things are going to change, but we will all be together. It’s the truth.

*Minor compared to what McMegan is talking about. Seemed like a hell of a lot to us.

Unless your children are in a pricey private school, they won’t make the right personal connections with other rich kids that eventually give them a plush job at a once-repectable magazine despite a lack of any real skill or talent.

But McArdle seems to not understand is that the worker making $20,000 a year kind of has an excuse for living at the edge of his or her means, the person making $400,000 doesn’t have anyone to blame but themselves.

Why is it necessary to try to apportion blame? This is as ugly and as ridiculous as McArdle’s suggestion that the wealthy are hurt more than are the poor by an economic catastrophe.

That would be the M. Todd Henderson who was world famous as a really really bad money manager and an amazingly stupid whiner.

Oh my god, that mole stuck its head up out of the hole? He was exactly who I was thinking of when I skimmed her post, the desperately status-conscious yuppie who needed a high-visibility high-status life to compensate for… something.

@Cheap Jim: Precisely this. Making $350k/yr in NYC you’re just a worker drone like all the other worker drones. A well-compensated one, but a drone — you’re not an “owner” or a “maker” of shit, really.

@Interrobang:
Dad’s long gone, mom just turned 94 and is bedridden in hospice.
Ain’t moving in there. Got no kids, at least I don’t have to see them suffer but then again I can’t mooch off them either.

I am in this boat and I’d just about give up every scruple I’ve acquired to have a $125K job. Maybe that’s the secret. Have no scruples. Whatsoever. Now it makes sense.

Also, too, this is specifically the whine of the urban over-privileged. My dad owned his own company so, yes, I grew up fairly rich. But he also specifically decided to raise us in a North Shore suburb with really good public schools so he didn’t have to spend the extra money on private schools. When my mom got a “fancy” car, it was a Chrysler, and my dad drove the station wagon.

So, no, I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for people who get themselves into financial trouble because they “had” to have a Mercedes or because little Madison “had” to go to the $30K private school instead of moving the family to a suburb with good public schools and Mom and/or Dad sucking it up with a longer commute.

@Birthmarker:
Seriously doubt it. More likely she may prevaricate, try to argue that she was never advocating sympathy for the rich, and accuse others of lying about what she said, even when using her own quotes. But she will never, ever walk it back. And she will not get fired.

M. Todd Henderson, a University of Chicago law professor who’s teaching a seminar on executive compensation, said the suffering is relative and real. He wrote two years ago that his family was “just getting by” on more than $250,000 a year, setting off what he called a firestorm of criticism.
__
“Yes, terminal diseases are worse than getting the flu,” he said. “But you suffer when you get the flu.”

To them, more than 250k and 450k are the same. To most of us, a 200k difference makes a difference.

I had no perspective, and I needed that minor blow* in order to become empathetic, in order to lose that sense of entitlement that comes with complacency. Some people just need to be kicked down a notch or two themselves in order to see the people who really do not have it anywhere near as good.

Sometimes we’re all guilty of building a nice bubble around ourselves until reality comes crashing in.

Heck, it took a near depression as a result of decades of conservative-libertarian economic ideas for me to ditch libertarianism and realize just how badly that idea fails in the real world.

Actually the $18k guy can usually afford to hire me (Chapter 7s are cheap… it’s a volume business) but he doesn’t need to because he doesn’t have anything anybody can take. A fair percentage of my job involves surprising people with the delightful news that they are too broke to need a bankruptcy.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex. “I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”

In other words, this guy is whining not because he can’t eat, because he’s unemployed or because he’s going to lose his house, but because he can’t live the way he wants, which is better than you, you dirty fuckers.

The update reminds me of a fax that I found in the company machine directed to my former boss from a financial investment firm. It was titled, “How living off $300k is harder than living off $30k and how we can help you.”

It was all about how much harder it was to live in a world of private schools, fancy houses, and charity galas than it is to not be rich. It was the kind of thing that made me wanna start a riot.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I don’t have a problem with wealthy people as such, I do have problems with the attitudes that seem to accompany wealth or even a mid six figure income, which is not the same as being wealthy. I thought being careful with your money and spending well under your means were kind of conservative concepts, as was/is the idea that the market determines what kind of income you’re supposed to have, based on your skills and experience. (Also, too, as in McMegan’s case, to whom you’re related.) As I noted earlier, people like the guys described in the Bloomberg piece are all about the market determining value.

Back when Chrysler and GM were about to go under, I read (and heard, personally) a lot of comments to the effect of “greedy auto workers, fuck’em. They’re not worth what they’re paid in this country, we’re in a global economy. Let them take fourteen bucks an hour and be happy they’re still employed.” This from the likes of people with exactly – exactly – the same attitude of entitlement displayed by some of the folks in the Bloomberg article. Now that the market has determined they’re not worth what they thought they were worth, they’re all butthurt because they can’t spend like they used to, and it’s just not supposed to be like this, and it’s just awful. The lack of self awareness, much less intellectual consistency, is something to behold.

Let it be noted, also, that these guys who were used to making $300K-500K annually are not truly wealthy, in the grand scheme of things. They look wealthy to someone like me, much less someone making minimum wage, but they’re really not. Which again is where the lack of self awareness, not to mention irony, comes in. These guys thought they were part of the masters of the universe class, and now they’re finding that they are well paid working stiffs (less well paid than they used to be), and they’re having to lower their expectations and standard of living. Isn’t that what conservatives preach when times are tough, that and exercising more hard work and some ingenuity to make up the difference between what they make and what they want to make? One can understand their emotions at having their income cut by half, but they’re a long way from being in danger of losing homes, or cars, or not being able to afford groceries or medications.

So I don’t resent guys like this, but I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for them either, because they don’t need my sympathy. They have to adjust their lifestyle? They’re just living in the world that everybody else lives in, where when times are hard you have to make “tough decisions” and “sacrifices”, just like that Randian asshole Paul Ryan says. Again, they’re not giving up groceries, they’re giving up vacation time and private schools (maybe), and they still live better than probably 90% of the people in this country. I’m supposed to feel bad for them? Not too much.

A friend is in HR at a big mutual fund. They’ve been through several layoff rounds, partly due to outsorcing and partly “because of the recession.”

Severance is generous compared to what I’ve experienced–a month’s salary per year of service. But wait, there’s more! The higher up the corporate ladder one is, the bigger the multiplier. Somebody working at the print shop will only get 1x but senior folks might get 4 or 5x. My friend has handed out 7-figure checks.

@jl: I just made a delicious brussels sprouts recipe with dried large lima beans. Vegetarian, filling, and very, very tasty. You sauté a pound of brussels sprouts in butter (or olive oil for vegan) until they’re brown. Then add some vegetable stock and some minced garlic. Then add already cooked large lima beans (or gigantes or butter beans), but use either from dried or canned kind, not the frozen so it’s nearly like fresh kind. I ended up using two cans of butter beans (rinsed) because my pressure cooker sprayed the dried beans all over yesterday and I had to improvise. Simmer until everything’s heated. Then, add some fresh herbs (whatever you have that tastes good), or, if you don’t have any fresh use pesto. I also added hot pepper flakes while cooking the brussels sprouts because I love heat and grated parmesan cheese on top when I served. It’s a one-dish meal and really tasty.

Let’s not forget that these are kids we’re talking about–we shouldn’t take joy in uspetting them, even if their parents happen to make a lot more money than we do.

Yes, McArgle-bargle, strawmen everyone takes joy in upsetting rich children. But the joy is not in their suffering, per se, you tone-deaf moron my love, but joy in the realization that exposing these kids to a public school education may prevent a few of the more susceptible ones from taking up a sociopathic libertarian lifestyle . I realize that this may mean a drop in future sales of overpriced kitchen gadgets attendance at future Koch sponsored self-indulgent greed orgies events, but them’s the breaks, you selfish, self-centered,…, HOW DARE YOU, of ALL people, tut-tutting others regarding their lack of concern for their fellow human beings, Dear GAWD!, the irony of you, of ALLL people,…, that’s IT, I fucking quit the human race if lousy, pathetic, sloppy, dishonest purveyors of such clap-trap are given a forum and a salary at prestigious magazine while actually talented individuals putter along in impoverished obscurity,… ENOUGH Atlantic, time for you to part ways with this parasite if you expect to retain even a shred of your former prestige toots…

“Likewise, when middle class people take out a mortgage that’s perfectly affordable on the income they’ve been enjoying for years, and then lose the house because they suddenly saw that income cut in half, we don’t feel a delicious sense of joy because they finally got what was coming to them.”

This after 3 years of her telling us how middle-class people losing their homes is Just What They Deserve for not being better caretakers of their money.

@FlipYrWhig:
Oh, I know she was referring to square footage, but 1200 square ft of condo in NYC (likely) includes granite countertops, hot water, and a front door that locks. 1200 square ft in the lowest of the low rungs of America is probably a trailer, but yeah, I can see how it is almost exactly the same.

To some degree you’re still just showing off by needing that Mercedes which is oh so much more safe than the Jeep (and stylish too) or that private school which is so much better than the local public school (and so prestigious!).

It’s the weirdness of where the empathy is directed by McMegan and her commentators.

In her and her commenter’s clients’ social circles, they’d consider sending your kids to public schools, or even a parochial school, as child abuse. Because obviously the more you’re dropping on your child’s education the better it is. And the more opportunity to network for your career when picking the kids up. So sending your kid to a public is a humiliation and a step down socially.

But, as we know, the hurt fee-fees of the rich top 1-10% take precedence over the struggles to make ends meet of the bottom 90%.

@Herbal Infusion Bagger: When you’re accustomed to privilege and perks, losing them feels like a tragedy, mostly because your sense of tragedy is badly warped. It’s like how some students who have always gotten A’s crumble to dust when they get a B.

Works for me, because needing a $1500+ machine to make Cream of Nothing sauce shows exactly how miserably badly these people manage money. Looks like the world would be much better off if we taxed the shit out of them, since then, per Arglebargle, they’d be used to not summering in the Hamptons and therefore not miss it; and also, these people would stop pissing resources away on stupid fucking shit.

@jibeaux: Agreed. It’s the fixed vs. not fixed that maybe needs more attention here. I’m fortunate enough to be in that general range of income, and just off the top of my head in 2 minutes I jotted down expenses we could cut, tomorrow, that equal about 25% of my post-tax expense outflow. Of course, half of that “expense” is actually “savings,” but whatever, you drop income for awhile, you drop saving for awhile. I know the lifestyles of the people McArdle and her reader are talking about, and most of them are nowhere near having “fixed” expenses so high they couldn’t drop them immediately. Country clubs are not lifetime obligations, and landscaping and housecleaning can, in fact, be done by the people living in the house. “Fixed” means car lease payments and mortgages and necessary utilities and bare minimum food, so, yeah, if someone making $300K (probably about $220 post-tax) has $200K of truly fixed annual expenditures, they’re waaay out on a limb.

I think Susan of Texas has her pegged: she’s not one of those Wall Street types, though she went to college with plenty of them. She’s “just” a hack sycophant for their interests — ostensibly pro-choice, but cheering on slut-shaming for women seeking abortions, ostensibly a journalist but part of the Koch puke funnel.

@pseudonymous in nc: Is it wrong that I’m glad I got under her skin? She is rather irritating. I wonder if I should respond until she bans me. I do have a piece to write…and this is some world class distraction.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the rich people who have no understanding what it’s like to be poor or how to budget within their new income. It’s the upper middle class who does that, too. When the economic crisis started my husband lost a third of his income. We paired down our expenses, rented out our house, and are renting a place ourselves.

I have a friend who’s husband isn’t getting the bonuses that they used to and they decided they need to budget and where complaining about that. I was asking her if they are going to pare down their kid’s activities since the two kids are in normally 4 each a month. I also asked about if they are cutting out the diet they are doing since they spend about $600 on that a month to buy the premade meals, and about cutting out a few other things, too. Nope, they aren’t but they sure are whining about not having money. Complete disconnect.

My bosses daughter and husband have moved back in with Mom and Dad. The daughter and husband both lost their jobs within months of one another. Tragic. And the Mom, my boss, is at the age when she is considering retirement and such.

Passing on the arugula and grey pupon are wildly different than moving back in with Mom.

Go fuck yourself McMeagan. And you asswipes who post at her blog are disgusting fools.